INTRODUCTION
Our research interests focus on social, affective and cultural neuroscience. Specifically, we are interested in:
• The role of emotion in morality and altruism.
• The neural mechanism of human interpersonal behaviors, such as cooperation, competition and negotiation.
• The neural correlates of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, especially how English and Chinese languages influence English and Chinese-speakers’ cognitive functions and social behaviors in the brain.
NEWS
On September 12, 2024, Chao Liu’s group at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and McGovern Institute of Brain Science at Beijing Normal University, in collaboration with Hang Zhang’s group at the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, McGovern Institute of Brain Science, and the Peking University-Tsinghua Joint Center for the Life Sciences at Peking University, published their research results in Nature Computational Science “The ‘motive cocktail’ in altruistic behaviors”. The paper exhaustively explores the multiple socioeconomic motives of people as bystanders in intervening in others’ injustices from the perspectives of social justice and altruism, and how the motives interact with each other to influence individuals’ altruistic behaviors, both in terms of punishing the violators and helping the victims. The study contributes to the understanding of psychological computational mechanisms as well as individual differences in third-party altruistic behaviors, such as bravery, and provides a theoretical foundation for future applications in areas such as altruistic values alignment in artificial intelligence.
On June 14, 2024, Chao Liu’s group at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Department of Psychology, Beijing Normal University (BNU) and the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Science published an innovative research result in the international journal eLife entitled “Social navigation: distance and grid-like codes support navigation of abstract social space in human brain”, revealing how the human brain uses spatial coding mechanisms to construct and navigate abstract social spaces. This study provides new insights into how the brain processes and integrates social information.
On May 16, 2024, Liu Chao’s group at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Science, published their research in PLOS Biology, “Acute stress during witnessing injustice shifts third-party interventions from punishing the perpetrator to helping the victim”. The study used MRI technology to elucidate the brain and computational mechanism of reversing third-party interventions of altruistic behavior from punishing the transgressor to helping the victim during acute stress, and the research results can help to understand how human beings adopt pro-social behaviors.
On April 16, 2024, the research team led by Liu Chao from the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, as well as the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Science at Beijing Normal University, published a paper online in the journal PNAS titled “Observing Heroic Behavior and its Influencing Factors in Immersive Virtual Environments.” The study used immersive virtual reality (VR) technology to investigate the psychological mechanisms and influencing factors behind people’s heroic behaviors.
• Moral emotions underlie puritanical morality
date : 2019-12-05
Our research group published a review, “Moral emotions underlie puritanical morality,” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in October 2023, revealing the importance of moral emotions in puritanical morality. The article adds to the theory presented by Fitouchi et al. and provides a new perspective on our understanding of puritanical morality.
With the recent rapid development of generative AI, represented by Chatgpt, the issue of “values alignment” in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently being discussed in full swing. In order to avoid future catastrophic consequences of strong AI for humans, researchers want to align the value system of AI with human values to ensure that its behavior does not cause harm to humans. The importance of this issue is clearly self-evident, but the specific path to achieve it is still very unclear, and if you look at any of the current declarations or drafts on the issue of AI “values alignment”, you can see various statements such as AI values alignment to conform to (human) “values”, “interests”, and “interests”. “, “interests”, “freedom”, dignity, “rights”, “autonomy ” and other words that are philosophically and jurisprudentially full of uncertainty and room for sophistry. If one has read Asimov’s series of science fiction novels about robots 80 years ago, one can see how such linguistically defined rules of logic, like the so-called “three laws of robotics”, can be easily circumvented by robots with a certain level of intelligence (for example, the easiest and most effective way is to change their own definition of “human”). (e.g., by changing its own definition of “human”).
Congratulations to the two doctoral graduates of our research group, Honghong Tang and Ruida Zhu, who have assumed the positions of associate professors at Beijing Normal University and Sun Yat-sen University respectively!
Mortality salience (MS) refers to reminders of death. Many studies found that MS can change people’s cognition and behavior. In February 2022, the journal, Cerebral Cortex, published a paper entitled “Mortality Salience Enhances Neural Activities Related to Guilt and Shame When Recalling the Past” by Prof. Chao Liu’s research team at the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning & IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research of Beijing Normal University. This study provides psychological and neural accounts of the influence of morality salience on moral emotions.
• Ruida Zhu successfully defensed his doctoral dissertation
date : 2019-12-05
On the afternoon of December 5, 2019, Ruida Zhu, a doctoral student of our lab, completed the defense of his doctoral dissertation in room 305, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University. The members of the defense committee are: Professor Xiaolin Zhou of Peking University (School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences), Researcher Xiaolan Fu of Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Yan Xu of Beijing Normal University (College of Psychology), Professor Li Liu of Beijing Normal University (College of psychology), Professor Shaozheng Qin of Beijing Normal University (State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning)
Major projects approved by the National Social Science Fund in 2019 has been released, After receiving funding in 2012 (characteristics of Chinese social cognition: integrated research of psychology and brain science, 12&ZD228, 2013-2017), Professor Chao Liu was once again supported by the major projet of NSSFC, interdisciplinary research on psychology, brain and artificial intelligence of Chinese moral cognition and emotional characteristics.(19ZDA363)
On October 18-20, 2019, the 22nd National Academic Congress of Psychology was held in Hangzhou Normal University. Professor Chao Liu delivered a keynote speench entitled “research and application of moral cognition and emotion in psychological and brain sciences” at the conference.
As philosophy and cognitive science have differences in research ideas and research methods, the combination of philosophy and cognitive science means that problems and concepts shall be analyzed through conceptual analysis and logical derivation in philosophy, and then the problems and paradigms shall be selected and summarized from examples in the daily life for empirical research in cognitive science. From the perspective of philosophy, cognitive science can confirm or disconfirm philosophical viewpoints and thoughts empirically; in turn, the experimental evidence of cognitive science enables philosophy to redefine and analyze problems and concepts. More importantly, cognitive science provides an objective approach to solve the controversial issues facing the field of philosophy for many years that can only be expanded by subjective speculation.
On November 7, NeuroImage published our research article entitled ”Differentiating Guilt and Shame in an Interpersonal Context with Univariate Activation and Multivariate Pattern Analyse”, the research article reveals the neural mechanisms of guilt and shame.
Guilt and shame, two typical moral emotions, often arise when social norms are violated. In spite of those similarities, guilt and shame are also believed to be conceptually and theoretically different.